Barry Dempster

  3/ Sweet Transformation – after Whitman The feeble/glorious arms of men, handing burdens over, passing on, away. Muscle is the soul sprung to life, the secret vice, the hard seed in the crux of the sunflower. I rest my cheek on a bicep: Jacob and his stone pillow. The cool crook of an elbow cradles me like a…

  Milton lay in his Cripplegate grave repeating to himself that one blindness was similar to another. He felt the weight of time-to-come the way he’d once borne sky. This was no more alone than his wives’ deaths had made him feel. As he’d feared, paradise had nothing to do with him. Still, there was comfort: no more ink-starved…

I buy a blue rose to describe and think of Yeats dipping his quill in an ah of ink, hoping that love on the page would be less painful, or at least more rakish, something to shove in a buttonhole and watch wilt, beauty slowly disintegrating to a bruise. Next morning, saturated with longing, I stumble to the kitchen for a…